


Fish and Data-Chips

by DesertScribe



Category: Original Work
Genre: Adventure, Bounty Hunters And Bisexual People In Space, Don't copy to another site, F/F, M/M, Science Fiction, Space Stations, Spaceports can have kitschy themed bars because human nature never changes, Spaceships, Two weeks of writing plus one week of editing equals ...this, attempts at romance, attempts at worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:47:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27812524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: Team Praz had been hired to do a simple job: collect a shipment of rare fish and deliver it to their rich client.  Transporting live animals from one planet to another wasn't exactly their specialty, but a paycheck was a paycheck, so they signed on, got the job done, got paid.  They didn't realize that doing so would gain them a powerful enemy who was willing and able to hunt them across as many star systems as their ship could carry them.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character, Original Male Character/Original Male Character, Scavenger on a Derelict Space Station/Adventurer on the Run From Bounty Hunters
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3
Collections: Heart Attack Exchange 2020





	Fish and Data-Chips

**Author's Note:**

  * For [redlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redlight/gifts).



"Here's to another successful endeavor for Team Praz!"

"Hear, hear!"

"Yeah, sure, yay us" Raphaela Praz, generally known as Raz to pretty much anyone who knew her outside of a business context for longer than five minutes, said as she raised her glass and clinked against the other two in answer to her brother Luc's toast, but her heart wasn't entirely in it.

She was happy that they had completed their latest job with minimal trouble and gotten paid with no trouble at all, of course. She was less happy about celebrating that completion and payment in such a ridiculous bar. However, it had been their sister Roci's (technically Rochelle, but that name only got used for official documents and by the people who read from those documents, like cops or spaceport customs officials) turn to pick where they celebrated, so Raz had minimal room to complain and zero veto power unless she could cite some obvious way in which the chosen location was an above average risk to their lives.

As it was, the place seemed tacky as hell but otherwise benign, so Raz contented herself to enjoying her drink while trying to pretend that she was drinking it somewhere other than the kitschy pseudo-Ancient Egyptian themed bar which had apparently caught Roci's eye when they first came through the spaceport and made enough of an impression that she chose it for their post-mission celebration without seeming to give any other location a second thought.

Team Praz had been hired by Lady Greeble, heir to one of the richest families living on planet Kitbash, to find and acquire several live specimens of a particular rare species of fish, because Lady Greeble wanted to add them to her ridiculously giant and fancy aquarium and show them off at a upcoming gala event for bragging rights. It wasn't the strangest thing people had tried to get Team Praz to do. The fact that the "treasure" they had been hired to find consisted of live animals made things a little trickier than usual, but aside from that is was pretty much just a basic fetch quest, so they were happy enough to take the job.

It wasn't exactly _easy_ money, but most of the difficulty lay in logistics and such rather than having to fight their way through piles of enemies or sneak through government blockades. They didn't even need to specifically break any laws in regards to collecting and transporting the rare fish, because Lady Greeble was rich enough to pull strings to buy out the annual harvest quota and get them official permission to transport the harvest off planet. Maybe _she_ broke the law somewhere during accomplishing all of that, but that wasn't any of Team Praz's concern as long as they stayed in the clear.

Anyway, long story short (at least so Team Praz thought at the time), they went to the Novo Pantanal where the fish was native, did a couple of minor tasks for some locals in exchange for their help getting the fish, got the fish, brought them back to Kitbash. The biggest challenge of the job had been transporting the fish once they got them.

Stasis pods sized for transporting livestock were always expensive, those designed for transporting aquatic livestock even more so. Then those already high prices had more than tripled in the weeks prior to Team Praz taking the job. Even if they had all the money necessary to pay the exorbitant prices with additional fees necessary to acquire the transport pods on such short notice (and they didn't, because Lady Greeble paid well but not that well), they would not have been able to. The livestock pods were inexplicably sold out at every supplier of new units, used units, and the parts which they might have been able to use to build units, within a week's flight of Kitbash, Novo Pantanal, and all jump points along the hyper-lane between the two. Maybe people who regularly transported livestock saw the prices going up, panicked, and started buying up as many as they could before the prices went hire. Whatever the cause, the result was that there was no way for Team Praz to get the equipment they wanted soon enough to meet their delivery deadline.

Luckily, it turned out that if a person looking to transport a whole lot of salmon-sized fish was willing to take the risk of improvising, they could skip buying an exorbitantly priced stasis pod designed for small to midsize aquatic livestock and instead transport their cargo in several standard human-class stasis pods. It required dumping the fish into the pods immediately before activation and then immediately decanting them into a bigger tank as soon as the stasis pod was deactivated at the other end of the journey, but it was doable. Team Praz _probably_ could have even skipped putting any water in the pods and thus not voided the warranties on their three spare stasis pods which they kept on hand for transporting the occasional paying customer or prisoner, but they didn't want to risk stressing the fish even more than they already were. The terms of their contract required delivering the fish in good condition, and the first batch of fish had used up the harvest quota for the fish for that season. If they damaged their first batch, they would not be able to replace them in a timely fashion without resorting to less than legal means.

Team Praz was not entirely against occasionally bending or even breaking a law or two in the course of completing a mission, but the government of Novo Panatal was famous for protecting the planet's famous biodiversity and resulting Eco-tourism industry by coming down hard on all poachers, with especially harsh penalties for poachers of protected species, and they had a massive army of rangers and game wardens to back it up. It made that particular fallback solution more trouble than Team Praz wanted to risk. It was cheaper and easier to mess up the spare stasis pods and then later pay to get them cleaned, overhauled, and re-certified. Besides, they were _probably_ still fully functional if whoever used them afterward didn't mind waking up at the other end of their journey smelling like they had been sleeping in a dirty aquaculture tank. Probably.

Anyway, the Team delivered the fish to Lady Greeble before the deadline that she had specified, and she was able to display the fish at that year's rendition of the big fancy gala which she threw every year as one of her contributions to the planet's social scene for the local high society. Lady Greeble paid the team what she had promised them. That was the end of it as far as Team Praz was concerned. All that was left for them to do was walk out the door while trying not to laugh too openly at the man throwing a minor tantrum over losing a bet with Lady Greeble over whether or not she could get the fish in time.

And that was what led Team Praz to their current activity of sitting at a booth along one wall (the coveted corner tables had all been taken before they arrived), enjoying their drinks and watching the floor show taking place in the center of the room while they waited for their food to arrive. Well, Roci and Luc were watching the floor show. Raz was mostly doing her best to ignore it, because the dancers might have been good looking in other contexts, but everything else about the show negated any potential sexiness for her. There was too much white linen and feathers and gold body paint and not enough black leather.

However, she could not resist occasionally looking up from her tablet, which she had been distracting herself with, first by running the final numbers for the job's expenses, and then by probing the non-existent security protocols (seriously, Raz was more of a mechanic than a computer expert and only knew the basics of hacking, but she had gotten through in less than a minute, because the security was just that weak) for the network which controlled the bar's sound and lighting system. The show didn't seem to be getting any better. In keeping with the bar's Ancient Egyptian theme, an assortment of men and women in skimpy outfits which were probably meant to represent a stylized version of Egyptian battle dress started dance-fighting at each other with lots of emphatic clanging of probably historically inaccurate chrome-plated scimitars against each other.

"Wow," Raz said, "on top of everything else, if this were real, they'd be completely trashing those cutting edges."

She had pitched her voice low enough so that it shouldn't carry to any other tables over the music and clanging, but Roci and Luc both shushed her anyway. Roci punctuated her shushing with a kick in Raz's shin under the table, just hard enough to faintly ache annoying for a while without bruising, and muttered, "Scantily clad people with sharp things and explosions, what's not to like?

Raz kicked her back with exactly the same amount of force, because that was her prerogative as eldest sibling.

Roci pretended not to notice, because of course she would choose to ignore a kick in the shin but not a verbal disparagement of her entertainment of choice.

Then a woman dressed as some kind of catgirl entered the dance and began pretending to slaughter everyone on both sides of the dance-fight, with gauzy red scarves over-dramatically thrown everywhere to represent blood and viscera. Suddenly, in between the rhythmically timed bursts of gratuitous pyrotechnics which had been pulsing in counterpoint to the dancers' movements, there was an extra loud _b-clang_ and a shout of pain as one of the swords went flying out of its wielder's hand mid-swing in a way that had nothing to do with clumsiness and everything to do with it having gotten in the way of a dangerous projectile. Chaos immediately broke out both onstage and in the audience, but not before Raz and her siblings were able to catch a glimpse of the source of the shot, a group of four armed and armored people who didn't look like they were there for Happy Hour, and realize that the straight line between the shooter and the dancer's sword could be extended right to Team Praz and only luck had saved them from sudden tragedy.

More than a few tables were knocked over in the scrambling, some accidentally as people rushed for the exit and some deliberately as people tried to create some instant cover from the shooter.

"What was it you said about that rich asshole's sworn revenge being nothing but psy-op gossip?" Roci asked as the three of them ran for the slightly sturdier looking cover of one of the bar's decorative columns.

"I stand corrected," Raz said as she pressed her back against the carved stone surface. She doubted that the column was solid stone, but she hoped the stone facade and whatever its support structure was might be thick enough to stop a few bullets. Even if it was, though, the column was narrow enough that it was not going to provide any kind of long term safety from the shooters. "And we can't stand here long, or we're gonna regret it!"

It would have been nice if they could have been able to just take advantage of the sudden chaos and escape out the front door without having to directly engage with the bounty hunters. Unfortunately, there were too many panicked people between Team Praz and the door and too few between Team Praz and the attacking bounty hunters. Not that they would specifically want to hide behind innocent bystanders like human shields, but so far the attackers had held off firing any more shots after the pandemonium started, so it seemed like there were limits to how much collateral damage they wanted to cause in the course of taking out their targets. Under those circumstances, getting lost in the crowd so that the bounty hunters couldn't take shots at what they couldn't find could have theoretically been an option that wouldn't have endangered any bystanders any more than they already were, but thanks to the jammed exit, making a speedy and unobtrusive exit did not appear to be an option at that moment, at least not by that route.

Team Praz didn't really want to engage with a bunch of kitted up attackers of unknown origin while they themselves had minimal weapons and protection thanks to this supposedly being a civilized spaceport on a civilized planet where these kinds of attacks didn't happen. They also didn't want to escape via doing anything that would make it look like they were the ones to blame for any injuries or property damage rather than the aggressors, because they had been hoping to keep doing business in the area since this last job had paid pretty well.

"What do you suggest we do?" Luc asked as he risked a quick glance around the edge of the column. He almost earned a shot in the head for his troubles, ducking back out of sight again just in time. Clearly, their temporary reprieve brought on by the milling crowd was at an end.

Raz glanced down at the tablet still clutched in her hands, grinned at her siblings, and said, "You thank your lucky stars that this show wasn't my kind of sexy and then on my signal we run for the backdoor." Then she put her spur-of-the-moment plan into action with just a few swipes of the screen.

The bounty hunters were not in full battle armor due to trying to keep at least a little bit of a low profile as they approached their prey. Therefore, they didn't have any helmets with heads-up displays which would have given them enhanced vision capabilities in adverse conditions, which meant that they did not have any technological assistance to help them when Raz used her hacked connection to the bar's network to turn off every ambient light in the place at once while simultaneously commanding every smart spotlight in the room (and there were dozens, mostly on the ceiling, but others on walls and decorative columns, and others on the floor, and another dozen on flying drones) to turn on and use their face tracking technology to keep them all pointing directly into the faces of the bounty hunters, blinding them.

It did not matter where the bounty hunters tried to turn, the smart spotlights followed their every move to provide maximum illumination on what the system now believed to be the stars of the show. One of the bounty hunters was smart enough to start shooting out the lights, and then the other two followed suit, but by the time that they had destroyed all the spotlights and pulled out flashlights (for as much good as that did them, given the massive spotty afterimages currently burned into their retinas and distorting their vision) to try to find Team Praz, their quarry had escaped out the "employees only" door behind the bar. While all that was happening, the last of the other bar patrons had escaped out the main exit, which allowed the security system to trigger a local lockdown of the premises to contain the attackers without trapping anyone in with them.

Once out the backdoor of the bar, Team Praz tried to get back to their ship by acting casual to avoid detection by any other potential pursuers. They were successful, but remaining one step ahead of their pursuers required leaving the planet without making any of the purchases they had intended to make right after finishing their celebratory drinks. Those purchases would have included important replacement parts for their ship, the Horror Vacui. If something failed out in the depths of space without the proper replacement part (or at the very least an improper part which could be sufficiently modified to last until they could find something better), then it wouldn't matter if random people appeared to try to kill them or not, because an unfixable malfunction would cause their ship to crash or explode or kill them in some other manner before anyone else got the chance to do it on purpose.

However, all three Praz siblings agreed that a potential catastrophic ship failure at some unknown point in the future was preferable to a much more likely chance of being actively hunted and murdered in the near future if they stayed where they were for too long. Once they got back to the Horror Vacui, they only delayed their departuer long enough to do a sweep of the whole ship to find any tracking devices that might have been hidden onboard.

Whoever was after Team Praz had hidden two tracking devices on the ship, one on the hull and one on the landing gear. They were set to transmit only intermittently on very narrow blasts designed to avoid detection by the ship's sensors. However, the Horror Vacui had a security system designed to monitor the whole surface of the ship and make note of any time something made physical contact with it. Mostly it was intended for keeping track of microscopic meteor strikes out in space, but when it was left turned on in dock then it was also very good for keeping a record of everyone and everything which touched the ship without permission. A low grade AI sorted all incidents into levels of concern based on an assortment of adjustable algorithms, and it flagged both instances of "a small beetle" landing and then never leaving.

Both tracking devices were found and destroyed, allowing Team Praz to make their escape without carrying any traitorous beacons along for the ride. While doing a manual sweep of the interior, they also found a spare pack of emergency ration bars which they had bought and stashed at some point in the past and then forgot about, possibly on purpose due to the bars having a taste and texture reminiscent of semi-reconstituted mystery meat jerky bulked up with dried kale shavings. It wouldn't be fine dining, but at least they would not have to go hungry on their way to whatever their next destination was.

Finding the tracking devices confirmed Team Praz's suspicions that the attack on them at the bar was not just a one-off show of power on Lord Nurnie's part and that the man seemed to genuine want them dead rather than merely driven out to somewhere beyond hi sphere of influence. They realized they needed to find somewhere to lie low for a while they regrouped.

The bar attack proved that populated areas were not any protection, so they decided to make themselves difficult to find by disappearing into the vastness of space. They wanted to avoid anywhere they had previous connections, just in case whoever was after them did research into their history to know where to look for them if they hid with friends or family, not that they had huge numbers of either, mostly just acquaintances.

Roci remembered an out of the way solar system she had read about when they were first trying to source livestock grade stasis pods for transporting Lady Greeble's fish. After their initial lack of results, her frustration had led her to set the search parameters to cover an area double the distance from their route than they could have spared the time to travel without missing their deadline, just to see if anything came up. She did get a few hits that way, but they were all so far out of range that no amount of milking extra speed from the engines would have been feasible, not even iv they coupled it with shortening the distance by paying extra to meet the delivery halfway. 

It had not seemed to be of any importance at the time, but Roci had also gotten a hit on a decades old news story, just another one of those random things the data collation algorithm threw into the list of results thanks to it coincidentally containing all her search terms. Raz and Luc had both been doing searches of their own at the same time, so it was not like wasting a little time on a distraction was likely to cost them anything, especially how Roci kept getting a whole lot of nothing for every viable search combo she could think of, and the article looked highly relevant to her interests given it was about the destruction of an entire planet, which as far as Roci was concerned was always fun to read about.

Apparently a small solar system had lost its only human habitable planet partway through the process of terraforming it thanks to a one in a trillion disaster in which a large comet had collided with the one of the planet's smaller moons, which had thrown off its orbit enough to destabilize the rest of the moons' orbits, sending several of them spiraling down to crash into the planet, which smashed the planet's crust like an eggshell and churned up its molten center, rendering the surface uninhabitable for probably the next million or so years. Scientists were thrilled at a chance to study such a phenomenon in realtime instead of inferring from evidence of past events. The people who had spent the past decades terraforming the place and then had to evacuate in the short space of time between someone calculating the level of destruction the comet's collision would cause and its inevitable outcome were much less happy about the situation and were forced to start over elsewhere. What had been just a fun few minutes of distraction at the time suddenly seemed like it might provide a solution to their current need to find a destination they had no previous connection to.

Further research showed that the system might be as close to perfect for their purposes as they were likely to find on short notice. There was still some mining going on in the system's various asteroid belts, so ships were still entering and leaving the area often enough that one more would not be unusual enough for anyone to take note of it, but there was no long term settlements still being maintained, so it probably wouldn't be very high on the list of anyone searching for a team of adventurers such as themselves who tended to prefer working out of more populated parts of the galaxy.

Raz and Luc agreed that it seemed like as good a place as any and wouldn't stretch the ship's capabilities too much getting there, even with their current lack of supplies and need to take an indirect route to confuse pursuers, so that's what they did. They headed in roughly (but not exactly, because that would be too obvious) the opposite direction from their intended final destination and stopped at the next system out from Kitbash to fuel up and grab some basic supplies that could be acquired without going too far from the ship. It was the functional equivalent of loading up on truck stop convenience store snacks, but it was better than nothing and better than having to eat those emergency rations they had found. Then they made a few zigzags in their route and, over the course of a couple of weeks, circled around to the system they had chosen.

* * *

It was not just the once enticing planet of New Vancouver which was a mere shadow of its former glory. The entire solar system surrounding it had the feel of a boomtown gone bust. It was not entirely uninhabited, but the abandoned structures drifting derelict in barely-maintained orbits drastically outnumbered those still in use. The only people left were those who were satisfied to eke out a living on the far fringes of more civilized space and those whose parents had made that choice, leaving the next generation too impoverished to go elsewhere.

Terraforming a planet was big business, both in terms of requiring a lot of people to get the job done (with all the extra people to feed, house, entertain, etc. the ones doing the terraforming) and in terms of being highly profitable for people high enough up the food chain, so everyone wanted a piece of the action when someone found a promising candidate planet. It was like a land-rush that extended far beyond the actual land. Space stations were built by the hundreds throughout the system to facilitate the process or to service those who were facilitating the process.

However, after the functional destruction of the one useful planet in the system, most of the orbital support stations were abandoned. It simply wasn't worth the cost to disassemble them, transport the pieces to another system, check the pieces for all of the thousands of ways which they could have possibly been damaged during the disassembly and transit process, and then reassemble them in a new location. It was cheaper, easier, and arguably safer to start over fresh with new equipment. There were dozens of space stations to choose from, even after ruling out all the ones which had fallen too far into disrepair due to failed automated support systems. Team Praz picked a medium sized one, big enough to have multiple enclosed docking bays but small enough that it was highly unlikely to have a squatter colony lingering in it.

Squatter colonies tended to either take great offense at anyone so much as looking at their territory (due to insecurity to having no legal claim, they tried to keep what they had taken by being more aggressive than any potential challengers) or they went to the opposite extreme and got all creepy about trying to add any newcomer to their gene pool, whether those newcomers wanted to join the collective living arrangements or not. Either way, it was best not to engage.

Team Praz approached their station of choice and connected to one of the external docking prongs radiating from the rings of the station. They skipped the outer ring and went for one on the ring closest to the station's main body, both because it would be closer to where they expected to find the things they needed and because the ship would be more sheltered from view. They clamped on, and the seals held when they tested them with a cycle of the airlock, so they opened up the doors and sent Raz and Luc into the station.

Access did not require any hacking because the previous owners couldn't write off the loss on their taxes if they kept the place secured as if they intended to come back, whereas leaving it unlocked left it free to function as an emergency shelter to any space ship in distress. Team Praz didn't technically fall into that latter category, but they figured they were close enough, so they engaged the manual override to the station's side of the air lock and let themselves in.

Getting access to one of the docking bays was going to be a little more tricky, requiring finding their way through the abandoned station to the docking bay control room, assessing whether the bay and its doors were still fully functional, and then figuring out how to work the controls to operate all that stuff.

Raz and Luc made their way through the station while Roci stayed behind on the Horror Vacui to monitor the ship's sensors and to keep herself held in reserve so that if any trouble happened on the station then it wouldn't be able to get all of them at once and Roci might be able to step in and rescue them after the fact.

All nonessential systems appeared to have been shut down, and everything else seemed to be running on low power mode, leaving the abandoned station appropriately dim and spooky looking. Air pressure, oxygen levels, and temperature were all sub-optimal, but only to the point of being uncomfortable, not lethal. They kept their spacesuits on anyway, though, because there was no easy way to tell whether all sections of the station were still maintaining pressure or just some of them. Also, there was always the possibility of an accident causing sudden depressurization while they were there.

At least navigating through the station was relatively simple. It was, like most such stations, designed to cater to people who had never been there before. Even without access to the station's local info-net (either the WiFi had been deemed nonessential and powered down while mothballing the place, or someone had taken the equipment after the fact, or it was just plain broken) there was still plenty of helpful signage at every hallway intersection, pointing the way to all of the station's various sections and departments. All Raz and Luc needed to do was follow the properly labeled arrows and manually open a dozen or so safety doors.

The systems which would have automatically opened and closed the doors whenever anyone approached them were, of course, nonessential and therefore powered down, but at least the sensors which monitored the air pressure on the opposite sides of the doors seemed to be active and functional. Raz and Luc did not leave any of the doors open long enough to test whether the warning alarms (which were supposed to screech at anyone who tried to keep a safety door open) were still enabled. In a reasonably short amount of time, they found their way to the internal docking bay closest to where they had parked the ship.

They had intended to take a quick look around the docking bay to make sure that it was still usable before they went to find the control room which operated it (that type of place tended to be off limits to the general public of a space station and thus would have fewer, if any, helpful signs to tell them where it was) so they could open the doors and let Roci bring in the Horror Vacui. As it turned out, it was immediately obvious that the docking was still usable, because it was already in use. More surprising than the unexpected ship was the even more unexpected naked man with with some totally unexpected unusual genitalia.

"Hello," said the naked man, who they appeared to have interrupted in the act of sorting through piles of scrap. His cheery greeting echoed off the docking bay walls. He was holding several dozen lighting bars, but he dropped the ones in his right hand so he could wave enthusiastically at them. He did not drop the lighting bars held in his left hand, nor did he drop the ones held by the long and obviously prehensile tentacles projecting from his crotch. "Are you here to engage my services? I am highly skilled at lovemaking."

Before either Raz or Luc could make comments about how they would certainly hope that he was highly skilled at lovemaking, because given his anatomy the alternative of being unskilled could potentially result in the accidental death of his partner, another voice, probably belonging to a woman, called out from inside the unexpected ship, "For the last time, Ken, none of the dehumidifier units want to fuck or be fucked by you, not even if someone drew a winking smiley face on one."

"I was not talking to the dehumidifier units, Ma'am," the naked man, apparently AKA Ken, said, still waving to Raz and Luc. "I was talking to my new potential clients."

"The toasters don't want to fuck you either, Ken, and you shouldn't try," the voice said in tones of resigned amusement. "I'd say it would void your warranty, but we both know that ship sailed a long time ago."

"I would never dream of making love to a toaster that had not properly consented to the act, Ma'am," Ken said. He was still smiling and waving. "However, I am not inviting toasters to partake of my services for a reasonable fee. I am ninety-nine point nine percent certain that I am directing my proposition to a pair of humans."

"What?!?" There was a clatter from inside the ship, and then someone, presumably the owner of the voice, came scrambling out of the ship's open cargo hold with a small laser pistol in one hand. Their face was not easily visible through their closed helmet visor, but their general shape indicated that they were either a woman or someone wearing a somewhat outdated woman's style space suit.

"The point one percent of uncertainty is because it has been that Graliens who have undergone extensive cosmetic surgery can sometimes pass for human in a wide variety of settings," Ken said, seemingly unconcerned by his companion's sudden display of hostility.

"That's not the issue at hand, Ken," the newcomer said. It sounded like they were talking through gritted teeth.

"Of course not, Ma'am," Ken said. "The issue at hand is which of these two fine specimens of probable humanity would like to partake of my services first. Or would they maybe prefer to both have me at once? If so, I am ready to oblige. As I said before, I am very skilled at lovemaking." Now, in addition to waving with his hand, he also waved with one of his crotch tentacles which had unwound from its bundle of lighting bars while the others maintained their grip. As it moved, its surface undulated in strange ways, as if it had tinier tentacles moving beneath the skin.

Raz and Luc both took an involuntary step backwards from the unnerving sight.

"I don't suppose we could just make polite introductions without any hostilities. Also, without any, uh, over-friendliness," Raz said, making a slow and hopefully nonthreatening looking gesture in Ken's general direction.

"We can try," said the scavenger, lowering her weapon but not putting it away.

* * *

Needless to say, the Scavenger, who introduced herself as Winn, did not seem thrilled to find herself surprised by the arrival of two strangers with weapons and spacesuits that were newer and in better condition than her own. However, she also clearly recognized that she was outgunned so she resisted the urge to try to take the first shot. Raz and Luc convinced her that they didn't want any trouble and didn't even want any of the stuff on the space station aside from the specific assortment of parts they had previously been hoping to buy before their circumstances changed, which the station should have multiple copies of, assuming they hadn't all been scavenged already. After seeing their shopping list and confirming that there was not anything worth fighting for on it, Winn visibly relaxed a great deal more but still appeared to be somewhat skeptical of the situation in general.

"Seriously," she said as she looked up from Raz's proffered tablet with the list displayed on it, "why not just buy this stuff new instead of wasting the fuel to come find used parts out here? Is this some new breed of hipster-ism I haven't heard of yet?"

"This wasn't exactly a planned trip," Raz said with a shrug, and Winn took that for exactly the admission it was meant as.

"Are the authorities after you for theft, terrorism, and/or murder?" she said.

"No," Raz and Luc said more or less in unison.

"Then I don't care," Winn said.

Roci, who had been using her siblings' suits' external microphones to listen in on the conversation, apparently felt that was a good time to chime over in her encrypted private link to Raz and Luc's helmet comms with, "Well, I mean, technically it's possible that somebody is after us for that if somebody else framed us for it or they're just plain wrong, so we can't entirely write off that possibility without doing a more thorough scan of the Interplanetary Law Enforcement communication channels…"

Raz and Luc ignored Roci's comment and instead offered Winn some of their spare rations as a gesture of good will. Both parties agreed to live and let live, and Winn pointed them to the control room to let themselves into the docking bay.

"It's nice that she decided to be so friendly," Luc said as they walked away.

"It's probably more a matter of keeping an eye on us. If I were feeling paranoid, I would want to keep new unwanted neighbors parked close where anything they did to wreck the structure would impact them as much as it did me rather than sending them to roost on the other side of the station where they could safely vent my local atmosphere without losing their own."

"Well it's still nice to not totally piss off the first locals we met," Luc said. "That's better than we sometimes do."

"If you say so…" Raz said.

They both failed to notice Winn staring after them. Ken, on the other hand, did not. "What is the old saying," he said, just as cheerily as ever but luckily in the much lower volume of his rarely used 'surreptitious conversation' mode, "'I hate to see you leave, but I love the sight of you walking away'?"

"Shut up, Ken," Winn grumbled, but she did not turn away. Whatever unknown troubles these two strangers might be bringing into her life, at least it was accompanied by some very nicely shaped bodies.

* * *

Meanwhile, back on Kitbash, Lord Nurnie was busy yelling at his bounty hunters who had failed at capturing Team Praz. He had originally only wanted to make an example of our merry team of space adventurers. However, new information regarding the cargo of fish which they delivered to Lady Greeble came to light after the team's escape.

Recently published scientific information indicated that the rare fish which Lady Greeble had Team Praz get for her had the potential to be more than just pretty status symbols. The fish's unique anatomy and digestive processes made it possible to feed high capacity data chips to them without damaging either the fish or the data while rendering the data chips and their contents invisible to all of the scanning methods known to be currently employed to prevent such data smuggling. It was all thanks to interference generated by the chemical composition of their bones and the naturally occurring micro-crystals which gave the fish's scales their unique shimmer which was the closest thing to a 3D hologram that any biological organism was known to produce.

The fish had already been prohibitively expensive to the average buyer due to their novelty and difficulty of breeding which led to extreme rarity even on their home planet. As soon as rumors of the fish's more utilitarian value began circulating, the dominant corporations of Novo Pantanal had raced to lock down all access to the fish so they could try to maintain a monopoly on them. All of this happened right after Team Praz collected their shipment for Lady Greeble. Lord Nurnie, or at least the people who did his bidding, learned about this while researching how Team Praz had managed to avoid his forces' notice (that was a simple trick; Lady Greeble merely hired multiple big name retrieval experts to distract Nurnie's forces, allowing the team of lesser known players to slip through unnoticed) during the operation to thwart Lady Greeble's ambitions.

His sources also indicated that Team Praz had apparently collected more fish than they delivered to Lady Greeble, probably as an insurance policy in case some died in transit. Now in addition to his revenge, Lord Nurnie also wanted to get his hands on the spare fish which Team Praz presumably still had with them since his bounty hunters had inadvertently sent them fleeing off planet before the adventurers had a chance too sell their spare fish for extra profit. Capturing those fish coupled with a plan to steal Lady Greeble's fish (or if that failed, poisoning them to keep them out of her hands) would allow Lord Nurnie to create his own local monopoly on the fish, thereby increasing his wealth and power even more than it already was.

His plans were already in motion. Despite Team Praz's hopes for a clean escape, Lord Nurnie's bounty hunters had a means of locating them after having lost track of them when they left Kitbash. Somebody bribed an employee of the Galactic Transit Authority to gain access to the database of hyperlane activity so they could look for recent records of ships matching the Horror Vacui's description. With access to that usually restricted information, it was just a matter of piecing together the route they had taken, one step at a time until they located which point they exited the hyperlanes without reentering to continue their journey.

The final step was more difficult due to Team Praz heading to a system away from the hyperlanes, and the bounty hunters would not have bothered if Lord Nurnie had not greatly raised the reward he was offering. With that increased incentive, the bounty hunters redoubled their efforts, eventually resorting to tracking them via a fleet of sniffer ships. These tiny space ships consisted of nothing but a propulsion system, one or two stasis pods, and a highly specialized sensor array capable of sampling chemical signatures quickly and accurately enough to identify the exhaust trail left behind by a specific target ship and reliably follow that trail at faster than light speeds regardless of how many twists and turns it took. Just about the only way to thwart a sniffer ship was to perpetually keep ahead of them, swap ships without anyone noticing and finding the new trail, or plan ahead and use a ship with multiple propulsion systems which could be jettisoned off (preferably into a star or other deadly destination) while the main ship's momentum carried it out of sensor range before engaging a new drive with a different chemical exhaust signature.

Most people didn't like riding in sniffer ships because the minimalist build meant the occupants were basically stuck in stasis from before launch until after they arrived at their destination, thanks to everything about the ship's design being pared down to the bare minimum necessary to transport a human through space. The design was the only way to keep the ship small enough to not overly disrupt the chemical trail it was following. It was effective but resulted in a transportation method which had all of the usual aspects of helplessness associated with traveling while in stasis, with the extra complication of the passenger not knowing where they were going or how long it would take to get there.

Unmanned probes with the necessary sensors followed by a larger, more traditionally built ship could not be used, because the larger ship could destroy the trail if the prey ship doubled back on its route, and waiting to send out a manned ship until after probes had located the prey would leave too large of a window for escape.

Lord Nurnie offered enough money for quite a few people to take the risks.

* * *

Meanwhile, unaware that they were about to be found a lot more quickly than they expected, Team Praz was, with the help of Winn and Ken (which was apparently short for Kracken; Winn insisted it was the bot's factory default name, and no one on Team Praz wanted to do enough research into past models of hentai-sexdroids to confirm or deny the veracity of that claim), jury-rigging parts salvaged from the station to fill in for the things they had not been able to procure before going on the run. It was a pleasantly domestic way to spend their time, in a grimy semi-post-apocalyptic industrial sort of a way.

During one of the scavenging trips through the station where Team Praz helped Winn and Ken gather the high value items she planned to sell to the squatter colonies in the system in exchange for Winn's help locating and extracting the items which Team Praz needed for the Horror Vacui (Team Praz didn't have much experience salvaging parts from derelict equipment, because they usually just bought the parts they needed whether they got them new or from a secondhand dealer, so Winn was better able to extract the more delicate components that they wanted faster and without damaging them), Raz found a crystal chandelier someone had constructed out of broken data chips.

"A scratch here, a micro-fracture there,," she said, holding up her find so that it could scatter the light from her suit's headlamps, "and suddenly countless petabytes of data become inaccessible. These things might have held libraries of great literature or medical knowledge, and now they aren't good for anything but dangling around and looking sparkly."

"Or it could have been someone's porn collection and their will stated that when they died they wanted it to be destroyed without anyone else looking at it," Roci laughed. "And afterward, their friend had all these broken data chips lying around, so they decided to build a reminder of their friend deliberately designed so that it in no way resembled all the fucking they witnessed when they no doubt peeked at the chips' contents before destroying them."

"That would have been a _whole lot_ of porn, like, amazingly huge amounts" Winn said, leaning in to look at the hundreds of broken data chips. "Also, if whoever made it really wanted to make something with a design that couldn't be mistaken for sexual, then they shouldn't have made it in the shape of a wide open hole when you look at it from below."

"Some people spend their lives trying to amass great wealth. Others are happy to build a nearly infinite spank bank."

"Actually," Winn said, "could I have this?"

"You think you could recover any of the data?" Roci said.

"Nah," Winn said, reaching out and gently tapping the tip of her screwdriver against one of the larger data chip fragments, making the cracked crystal chime strangely in the thin air, "the only thing these chips are good for besides looking pretty is grinding them up smaller to make signal-scattering scanner-proof paint, and there's not much call for that around these parts. Anyone who would want any already has more than enough material lying around to make it for themselves. I just think it would make a fun souvenir of our time together."

"In that case," Raz said as she handed the small chandelier to it Winn, "I hope it reminds you of me every time you see it." Maybe Raz blushed and faltered a little awkwardly as she said it.

Maybe Winn also blushed as she accepted the gift.

Roci and Luc very definitely did not comment on either of these things, because they knew that the best sibling teasing happened when it wouldn't mess things up enough to prevent the opportunity for a lot more teasing in the future.

Ken, on the other hand, happily began to announce, "Ma'am, I believe Ms. Praz is offering t--"

Roci clapped her hand over his mouth while Luc bodily dragged the android out of the room. At some point in the past Winn had tried to teach him about the importance of consent, the results of which mostly manifested in Ken making declarations like, "I only consent to wear pants on special occasions." The younger two Praz siblings hoped their attempts to teach him about tact would have more useful results.

* * *

Unfortunately, the quiet days which Team Praz, Winn, and Ken spent together on the abandoned space station were never going to last, and all of them aside from Ken knew it. Even if Lord Nurnie decided to stop paying people to chase them (and he really should have, they thought, because the bet he lost would have been too small to even be pocket change to someone as rich as him, and soothing his pride by hunting them long enough to catch them shouldn't have been worth the expenditure), Team Praz would not have been able to hang around the station forever. However, they had all expected those days to last a little longer than they did.

Their peace was disrupted by the Horror Vacui's computer broadcasting an alert over their comms. That part was not a total surprise. After seeing how easy it was to sneak up on Winn without even trying, Team Praz had decided to tap into the network old transit drone satellites which kept track of traffic throughout the system for purposes of routeing ships away from each other to minimize chances of collisions. Ordinarily, the hacking job necessary to access the satellite network would have been beyond the capabilities of Team Praz, because as antiquated as the system it was still a lot better protected against tampering than that bar's lighting system had been. However, Winn had spent her whole adult life getting into places where she didn't belong with only herself (and eventually a sexdroid repurposed to provide conversation and help with heavy lifting) to rely on, so she had incentive to level up her hacking skills far beyond what Raz had ever mastered. With Winn at the keyboard, it was the work of minutes to access the satellite network and order it to send an alert to their ships whenever anything small and fast entered the system.

Mining ships were most of the traffic in the area and they were never small and fast, while bounty hunter ships were almost never big and slow. Therefore, when they were informed of the nearly simultaneous arrival of a half dozen very small ships within the solar system's heliopause, they knew that chances were near zero of it being anyone other than more bounty hunters, and the speed at which they had been found indicated those very small ships could only be sniffers.

Luckily for Team Praz, Sniffer ships were programmed to automatically reduce their speed when in close proximity to solar systems to avoid hitting meteors or planets while traveling at the speed of light. The ships' sensors could follow a faint chemical trail at high speed for light years at a time, but solid objects moving into the ship's path from the side would not be detectable until it was too late. No amount of shielding would protect a ship from a faster than light impact with anything of significant size, and the force of that impact would destroy everything involved and anything else nearby. Those sorts of potential collisions became far more probable in proximity to stars and their associated natural and man made detritus. However, despite slowing down, the ships were still working on the autopilot which follows the trail left by their target without being able to do much critical thinking beyond following their preset protocols and taking evasive maneuvers to avoid collisions.

The satellite alerts gave Team PRaz enough forewarning to take measures to delay capture. They were able adjust the Horror Vacui's engines enough that they would put out a significantly different chemical trace in its exhaust the next time they used it. Then they fled the station in the Horror Vacui with Winn and Ken following close behind in hopes of further disguising the chemical trail. After they left, they launched their final diversionary tactic, courtesy of several old one-way delivery drones that had been left behind on the station when it was abandoned.

The drones had originally been designed to deliver terraforming chemicals to the planet via dispersing them while burning up in the atmosphere, so they were not high priority salvage in terms of something loaded with useful parts scavengers could repurpose. However, they were a really good thing to have on hand if you wanted something that you could send flying away from your location in random directions without caring whether it returned. The drones would help confuse the sniffer ships since there would suddenly be multiple new trails with none of them perfectly matching the original. While most of the sniffer ships split up to track the departing drones, one sniffer docked itself at the station, presumably having awakened its occupant to go investigate the potential bolthole of their quarry.

* * *

By the time that the bounty hunter was awake enough to do any searching, there was no one on the station to find. Team Praz and Winn were well on their way to a squatter colony Winn thought would be willing to help them. Winn had picked a squatter colony which, due to trading some of her scavenged goods with them on multiple occasions in the past, she knew was one of the ones that was more inclined to add people to their gene pool than blow them out of the sky.

Team Praz was worried about how they would escape, but the leader of the colony just laughed at them and said, "We're squatters, not savages." He then explained how it was more trouble than it was worth to try to keep people who didn't want to stay there, not to mention a waste of resources. It was far easier to just collect a tiny tissue sample from each of them and freeze it for later use. The technology to turn adult cells into either clone embryos or ova to be combined with sperm to produce non-clone offspring had been perfected centuries ago.

Team Praz was still a little reluctant, until Roci jokingly said, "Maybe this'll finally get Mom and Dad to stop bugging us about giving them grandkids?"

There was a very brief moment of contemplative silence, and then all three agreed.

Then the colony leader said that if Luc was also willing to provide a sperm sample, then the colony would provide the four human visitors with fresh food for a week. Luc was reluctant at first because he didn't like the idea of masturbating when people knew he was masturbating.

Winn said she would "help" with the process if that was what it would take for her to get the first non-processed food she would have eaten in months (even ignoring the emergency rations, none of the long-storing foods Team Praz favored came anywhere close to fitting that description), but Luc blurted out that Raz might not ever forgive him if he let Winn do that with him.

Then Ken volunteered his services yet again, and this time Luc looked thoughtful instead of turning him down outright.

After receiving assurances that Ken would never disclose what exactly the two of them did together, Luc agreed, and the two of them disappeared off into a small room and emerged a while later with Ken triumphantly carrying a suitably filled specimen container and Luc looking flushed and disheveled but smiling.

* * *

When the bounty hunters finally eliminated all the false trails and tracked Team Praz to the squatter colony, they tried to force their way onto the station to capture their prey.  
The outer hull of the agricultural station proved to be too strong for the small weapons of the sniffer ships to penetrate. The sniffer ships were built for rapid transport, not for siege breaking tactics. Also, the agricultural station had been built to last, and then if had been reinforced even further to withstand the constant bombardment by all the extra not-so-micro meteors which had been thrown up into that region of space by the disaster which had destroyed the planet the station had been servicing. It was like trying to take out an armored tank with a peashooter. However, when a bored teenager colonist contacted one of the sniffer ships without permission to taunt them this fact, they let slip that this was indeed the location of the bounty hunters' prey, and after a little more conversation the bounty hunter was able to bribe his way aboard the station to continue his pursuit.

Unbeknownst to the bounty hunter, the bored teenager was not so bored as to want to see all her friends and family potentially caught up in the crossfire of whatever that asshole had planned, so as soon as he cut the comm connection with her, she went and told someone who could do something about it. The squatter colonists had not taken kindly to the bounty hunters' "shoot first, and ask questions later" policy, so as soon as the bounty hunter was aboard the station he was jumped, taken prisoner, and locked up, while his ship was immediately stripped for parts. The squatters weren't savages, but they also weren't pacifists, especially not in the face of open hostility.

The bounty hunter in turn didn't take kindly to being tricked and captured, so he clammed up and refused to answer any questions. However, the squatter colonists had been able to capture the bounty hunter before he could send out any kind of distress call, and they were able to wrestle his data pad away from him. The data pad was locked, but Winn was on hand to take care of that.

She pulled a data pad of her own out of her pocket, went to work on it, and within minutes, had gained access to everything on the data pad, including the file containing the written orders the bounty hunters were following, a list of the other members of the captured bounty hunter's team, and most importantly, what appeared to be direct access to the sniffer ships' onboard computer systems, which made sense given how their design lacked a cockpit and they operated as a swarm.

Stuck outside the station in ships that were little more than traveling stasis pods and with no idea that their compatriot had been captured instead of allowed to run free in pursuit of his prey, the bounty hunters never stood a chance against the command Winn sent from her commandeered data pad, sending the bounty hunters back into unconsciousness. With the passengers of the other sniffer ships incapacitated, Raz, who had not even noticed how close she had leaned into Winn while watching her work, directed Winn to have the sniffers dock at the squatter colony.

Those ships were also stripped for parts just like the first one.

The squatters would have liked to have been able to keep everything. However, they could not keep the stasis pods, because they did not want to have to keep the bounty hunters, aside from the usual tissue sample which the squatter colonists collected from each one to add to their genetic archives. Those samples were marked with an annotation in their accompanying files that the DNA sources were assholes so they shouldn't be mixed into the gene pool unless it was the only way to avoid catastrophic inbreeding within the colony at some distant point in the future.

The squatters happily kept the small faster than light propulsion units and the fancy sensor arrays, while the stasis pods, their emergency backup power supplies, and their cargo of unconscious bounty hunters were loaded up onto Winn's ship to be jettisoned somewhere away from the squatter colony station. The stasis pods' built in distress beacons would activate as soon as they hit hard vacuum, and sooner or later someone with less of a grudge against the bounty hunters than the people they had been chasing or the people they had been attacking would hear the beacons' signals and wander over and rescue them. Probably.

While Winn left the station to complete her errand, further investigation of the bounty hunter's data pad confirmed that Lord Nurnie was indeed the one who had sent the bounty hunters after Team Praz. They had suspected as much all along, but they were still somewhat unnerved to discover that someone with so much money and power was sending bounty hunters after them due to something so seemingly minor as making him lose a bet over fish. The data pad did not include any of the information about the fish supposedly having nearly magic data smuggling capabilities, because Lord Nurnie was keeping that part under wraps. The bounty hunters didn't need to know why he wanted Team Praz and the fish, they just had to get them for him.

Team Praz was also confused about why Lord Nurnie seemed to think they had the fish with them when he had been at Lady Greeble's gala event and saw the fish in her aquarium there. Did he think they were supposed to take the fish back to their homeworld after the event instead of Lady Greeble keeping them as pets or eating them as sushi or whatever she planned to do with them? They did not have a spare stasis pod full of fish that they had been carrying around for the past month. In hindsight it would have been a nice opportunity for some extra profit, and they would have to remember that angle for next time, but in the here and now Lord Nurnie and his hired goons were barking up the wrong fish-scented stasis pod.

Just then, Lord Nurnie himself rolled up to the squatter colonists' space station in a spaceship much larger and better armed than the sniffers. The sniffers had been transmitting reports of their progress every time they changes direction. Nurnie got tired of waiting for them to declare success so he decided to go ahead and give chase himself. He felt so assured of success that he forgot that the presence of his giant ship could have messed up the trail if it had doubled back on itself. Too bad they hadn't bothered doubling back on themselves after that initial stop for fuel. Oh well, too late to do anything about that now that Lord Nurnie was there and threatening to start launching missiles which, unlike the dinky little weapons on the sniffer ships, were definitely big enough to do serious damage to the squatter colony's agricultural station if Team Praz didn't immediately hand over themselves and their valuable fish.

Lord Nurnie repeated that he would destroy the station if Team Praz did not give him the fish. Team Praz answered that any fish they had were on the station with them, so destruction of the station would result in the destruction of his prize. If he wanted fish, he would have to come and get them himself, and he would have to do it alone. If he brought any extra hired goons with him, then they would space the fish just to be done with the matter. The fish had some interesting properties, but being able to survive sudden decompression followed by being flash frozen in space probably wasn't one of them.

"Wow," Raz said with an incredulous sigh, "we're really taking imaginary fish hostage. Is this a new low for us or a new high?"

Roci giggled. "I don't know. Maybe a little bit of both?"

Luc shrugged. "Does it matter?"

"No," Raz said, locking her space suit helmet into place, "not really. Let's go show this asshole that people's ability to kick his ass literally or metaphorically isn't proportional to their bank accounts."

All three of the checked their weapons one last time and prepared to meet with the man who was behind all the trouble they had been facing lately.

When they were finally face to face (or at least space suit visor to space suit visor, because Team Praz didn't trust him not to go back on his word and try to crack open the station, and because apparently Lord Nurnie was planning to do exactly that or he just plain didn't trust the decrepit looking station to continue to maintain pressure while he was on it) Team Praz said they would take him to the fish.

They led him to the aquaculture part of station's agricultural facilities.

When Lord Nurnie got pissy about those fish obviously not being the ones he was talking about, Roci said, "Then you're out of luck, because these are the only fish here."

Lord Nurnie still refused to believe that they hadn't kept some of Lady Greeble's fish for themselves.

"Dude," Raz said, laughing right in his face, "even if we had wanted to do something like that, we aren't exactly the kind of people to be any good at keeping pets alive."

"Hey, speak for yourself," Luc said. "I kept those goldfish Dad got me alive for a decade! It would have been even longer if they hadn't gotten electrocuted when the house was struck by lightning."

"Uh, you know those goldfish were fake, right?" Roci said, because apparently the presence of a crazy rich asshole who was threatening death and destruction was not enough to derail the natural compulsion to Lecture Your Younger Sibling About Stuff You Think They Should Have Figured Out Ages Ago. "Mom and Dad weren't going to trust a five year old with anything actually alive."

"What?!?" Luc exclaimed. Lord Nurnie might have exclaimed the same thing at the same time (hopefully for different reasons), but he wasn't family, so no one else taking part in the conversation cared.

"Yup," Raz chimed in, because apparently she was not immune to the Lecture Your Younger Sibling compulsion either, "from Applezon's SynthPetics line of robo-animals. The ads for them were everywhere when we were kids. You have to remember them. The music was so earwormingly obnoxious that it's still taking up valuable space in my brain after all these years. You honestly never noticed that your goldfish didn't get any bigger the whole time you had then, their 'poop' was just a more chewed up version of the food you gave them without any other changes to it, or that they got sluggish whenever you turned off the tank's lights because the wireless charging system was on the same switch?"

"Please tell me you at least noticed that Ken is an Android," Roci begged. "It's bad enough having to tell you that your pets were never alive nearly ten years after they 'died.' I don't want to have to have this exact same conversation about the recent state of your sex life."

Before Luc could answer, Lord Nurnie shouted, "Enough! I have had enough of your inane chatter. Now, cease your pointless stalling and tell me where those fish are or face the consequences."

* * *

Meanwhile, the captured bounty hunter was causing trouble, because the squatter colonists had drugged him as part of his capture so they hadn't been able to put him back in his stasis pod to send off with Winn like the others until the drug was out of his system or they would risk incriminating themselves by leaving evidence that they had committed piracy against him and his ship instead of salvage. Unfortunately, while they were waiting for the last of the drug to be metabolized, he shook off the worst of the drug's effects and escaped from where the squatter colonists had been confining him. From there, he went on a one man rampage through the station, attacking whoever he came across in his search to find Team Praz and/or Lord Nurnie, who he new was now on the station thanks to Nurnie's conversation with Team Praz being publicly broadcast so everyone could hear it because it was their station and their lives he was threatening. 

Back in the station's agriculture hub, Raz tried to distract Lord Nurnie with conversation so he would not notice Roci and Luc sneaking away to help deal with the escaped bounty hunter. Unfortunately, Lord Nurnie was the kind of guy who would never be distracted by the sound of anyone's voice but his own, which was not an option given his current fervor. Even as she got him to launch into a monologue about his motivations in which he ranted about how useful, and therefore profitable, the fish would be thanks to their unique characteristics which went far beyond their flashy exteriors, he was constantly shifting the aim of his weapons between all three Praz siblings, so there was no chance of anyone sneaking away to help capture that bounty hunter, whose escape they had been quietly alerted about by way of their private comm channels.

The monologue did not provide the distraction Raz had hoped, but it was nice to finally know exactly why he was throwing so many resources into going after them, even if the base reasoning sounded pretty dodgy. Clearly this was the kind of guy who skimmed one article about something and instantly assumed that made him an expert on the subject. Sure, the fish's ability to mask the contents of data chips from being scanned might be unique in the animal kingdom, but there were plenty of commonly used methods of achieving the same effect which did not involve anything needing to pass through a digestive tract. Had the guy really never heard of signal-scattering scanner-proof paint? The stuff had been common knowledge for centuries.

Meanwhile, Winn, who had finally returned from her errand of dropping off the stasis pods a suitable distance away from the squatter colony, spotted Lord Nurnie's ship and didn't like what its presence meant for the people she had grown quite fond of. She decided to use her hacking skills to gain enough control of the systems of Lord Nurnie's ship to kill the block on broadcast communications he had established upon arrival. It took her a little while, but she was able to get into the system while leaving Nurnie's crew none the wiser. She shut down the communications scrambler which had been being used to prevent any calls for outside assistance by the station, and sent a quiet alert to all the earpieces that didn't belong to Nurnie or his crew, which were easy to identify due to Team Nurnie all using the same specific recently released model while everyone else was using a wide variety of other models, none of them nearly so new. This let Team Praz and all the squatter colonists know that their long distance communications were working again but they should pretend that they weren't.

Raz tried to get Nurnie to go away back to his happy little rich asshole existence by pointing out that only biology nerds were going to care about the discovery about the fish and getting a monopoly on the fish won't give him the advantage he thinks it will unless he was looking to get bragging rights within the aquarium industry, and that goes through fashion trends like any other consumer industry, so people would get tired of buying mass quantities of sparkly fish from him within a year and instead flock to buying some other species. Also, the profit margins were unlikely to be nearly as good as he expects them to be, because the fish are a total pain in the ass to keep alive.

Nurnie didn't believe her, because he still refused to believe that anyone could know more about anything than he did. Also, he figured that if the fish weren't valuable, then why did the planet lock down the fish's breeding grounds right after the discovery about them was made? (It was because the breeding grounds were closed to harvesting every year as soon as the small quota allowed to be caught had been met. The shipment Team Praz had taken was big enough us use up the entire quota, so the breeding grounds were shut down for the rest of the year to prevent unsustainable numbers of the fish from being taken.) At least his little rant provided an interesting scene for everyone present for it to surreptitiously record as more proof of his erratic and threatening behavior, which would be useful for discrediting him later.

Roci then tried to get Nurnie to leave them alone by arguing that if the manifest he saw had different numbers than what they knew they were, , then it was either some kind of transmission error or someone was deliberately feeding him bad information, which would mean they were trying to manipulate him in some way and that he therefore had, no pun intended, bigger fish to fry than Team Praz. The number of fish they took couldn't have been officially recorded as being as high as he alleged, due to the aforementioned tightly regulated harvest quotas. If they tried to take that many while going through legal channels, they wouldn't have been allowed to keep them all, so the number on their manifest would not have been that high. If they had tried to take that many illegally, they would not have bothered recording it on the manifest, because it would have gotten them caught, so the number on their manifest would not have been that high.

That argument succeeded, but unfortunately that just meant that Nurnie gave up looking for the fish (at least for the moment, there was no telling whether or not he still believed that _somebody_ must be hiding spare fish from him even if it wasn't Team Praz), and skipped ahead to trying to kill Team Praz to make an example of them to anyone else who might think of working against him in any capacity, just like he had planned to do to them back before he found out about the fish's data smuggling properties. 

At that point, Team Praz decided to stop playing nice and take down this asshole using the improvisational teamwork which they had developed over a lifetime of knowing each other. Raz surreptitiously toggled off her spacesuit's external speakers and, doing her best ventriloquist impression so not to tip off Nurnie by moving her lips, whispered the name of the attack ploy she intended for them to use over their comm links. Roci and Luc communicated their agreement in the same manner. Then, without further ado, they sprang into action.

All three of them scattered, Raz and Roci darting in opposite directions while Luc dove for cover behind the nearest available piece of equipment big enough to hide him.

This left Nurnie with two very obvious moving targets. He also had two weapons in his hands, so he saw no reason not to open fire with both. However, shooting two weapons at once was a lot more difficult than holo-film actors made it look, especially if one wanted to have any kind of accuracy. As Raz had predicted when calling the play, Nurnie was not the kind of person who put any time or effort into practicing dual-wielding weapons. Judging by how he moved, he probably hadn't even put much, if any, time or effort into practicing shooting with a single weapon, not when he had more than enough money to pay someone else to do all his dirty work for him before his poor impulse control got the better of him. He sprayed out a lot of shots, but did not manage to hit either Raz or Roci at all.

He hit a lot of other things, but Team Praz had consulted with the leaders of the squatters before Lord Nurnie came onboard and had specifically chosen this location for their final confrontation because it was deep in the station where there were a lot of nonessential structures standing between them and anything critical to maintaining the integrity of the station and the survival of its inhabitants. The squatter colonists might lose some small percentage of their harvest, but they would be able to repair all the holes Nurnie punched in the place at their leisure rather than rushing for their lives.

Meanwhile, Raz and Roci made Nurnie's task of trying to hit two targets increasingly more difficult as they ran around to flank him on either side. He realized the futility of trying to shoot both of them at once around the time that they had both gotten far enough around him that he couldn't keep one in view without losing sight of the other, no matter how quickly he whipped his head back and forth, and he had reached the limit of how far back standard human shoulder anatomy and a spacesuit designed to accommodate it would allow fully extended arms to bend behind the body before not allowing it to go any further without painful consequences. He was forced to momentarily give up tracking one of his targets in order to swing his whole body around to follow the other.

Maybe he would have been able to hit a single target once she had his full attention, since the firefight was happening at relatively close range. Maybe he still would have missed. He never got the chance to find out, because by pausing in his firing to swing around to home in a single target (he had picked Raz, by her own design; she was always the one who went to the shooter's right when making this play unless she knew ahead of time that they were up against someone who favored shooting left handed, because she figured it was her duty as eldest sibling), he unknowingly signaled to Luc, who he had already forgotten about in the heat of the moment thanks to the youngest Praz sibling being out of sight and therefore out of mind, to pop back out of hiding and shoot Nurnie with a high powered stun blast before he had a chance to register that his third potential target was back in play.

Moments after Nurnie hit the floor with a clang of armored spacesuit colliding against metal drainage gratings, the escaped bounty hunter, who had been drawn by the sound of gunfire with the expectation of finding either his quarry and/or his boss, burst into the area. His sudden arrival put him right in the firing line of both Raz and Roci, so he too found himself unceremoniously blasted into unconsciousness. Like his employer, the bounty hunted collapsed to the floor, only he made more of a meaty thud sound since the squatters had confiscated his space suit prior to imprisoning him. After that, it was a simple matter of restraining the two men before they regained consciousness.

With the immediate threat contained, Team Praz contacted Winn's ship on a secure channel and asked if she could use her connection to Nurnie's ship to seize full control of its systems the way she had shut down the communications blocker.

"I took control of the rest of the ship's systems right after I pinged you," Winn said. "What do you want me to do with it?"

"If you aren't tired of helping us out after everything else you've already done for us," Raz said, "we would love it if you'd be willing to help us wrap up a present to send back to Kitbash."

"It would be my pleasure," Winn said. "Just give me a few minutes to dock."

* * *

As soon as the airlock finished cycling to allow Winn entry back onto the agricultural station, Winn rushed toward Team Praz, who had been waiting for her on the other side, with an exclamation of, "I was so worried about you!" Her words might have been meant for all three siblings, but the way she went straight for embracing Raz indicated that there was one member of the Praz family which she had much stronger feelings for than the others, as if that hadn't already been obvious to all of them.

Roci and Luc ignored the unintentional slight and instead encouraged the action with cheering, wolf-whistles, and then suspiciously simultaneous announcements of very important commitments elsewhere on the station (partying for Roci, food and a maybe later partying for Luc, possibly with Ken if they could find enough privacy, but he didn't say that part out loud) which Roci and Luc expected to keep them away from the Horror Vacui until late at night or possibly the next morning, and therefore Raz and Winn shouldn't bother waiting up for them.

Raz and Winn, in turn, did not need any more urging than that.

* * *

Luckily, the ship's long range communicator did not ping them with an alert of an incoming call until several hours later, when the frenzy of their earlier activities had slowed and been replaced by lounging against each other in sweaty contentment among Raz's disheveled bed sheets. If it had gone off any earlier, interrupting the best sex Raz had had in a long damn time, she would have been highly annoyed, and she expected Winn would have felt much the same about the situation. As it was, she would have been tempted to ignore it in favor of another round of more of the same if not for the events of the recent past which had led to these private celebrations and the fact that the call originated from the person who was also the origin of all the trouble they had just been through.

Curiosity was enough to overcome Raz's post-coital lethargy, so she planted a parting kiss on Winn, rolled out of bed, threw on a shirt, ran a hand through her short hair (it ways always messy looking in that deliberately tousled way of pixie cuts anyway, and if it happened to look worse than usual right now, she could blame it on the local time's late hour), and then sat down at the small desk beside the bed to answer the call. The comm's camera was at the wrong angle to show the occupant of her bed or her own lack of clothing below the waist. She would just have to hope that Winn had not sucked on her neck hard enough to leave any visible hickeys. As much as she enjoyed the process of getting (and giving) them, she also liked to maintain at least a semi-professional image when communicating with clients, especially ones as rich as Lady Greeble.

Raz held up a finger to her lips while winking at Winn, who lounged against the pillows looking somewhat askance at Raz but nodding to indicate that she would remain silent as requested, at least for now. Then Raz turned and smiled blandly for the comm's camera while finally allowing the call to connect.

"Lady Greeble," Raz said by way of greeting, "to what do I owe the honor of once again having your personal attention?"

"My dear Ms. Praz, news of your recent travails has been brought to my attention," Lady Greeble said. That in itself was an interesting admission, given how said travails had been concluded in a sector of space controlled by different authorities than Kitbash and how the representatives from the local law enforcement outpost (who were the only outside contact which had been made regarding the situation) were not even due to arrive to assess matters for another twelve hours or more, never mind the weeks it would take to transport Nurnie and his goons back to his home planet by the most direct route at top speed. Raz did not have time to dwell on it, though, because Lady Greeble continued, "And I wanted to make sure that nothing which occurred as a result would impact your willingness or ability to continue our business relationship."

"We're unharmed, thank you for asking," Raz said. "Our ship is overdue for maintenance, but that can be remedied easily enough."

"And I trust that your experiences have not overly besmirched your opinion of the fine people of Kitbash?"

"I'm sure Lord Nurnie is responsible for his own lack of self-restraint, regardless of who or what might have caused such an enticing trail of bait to be laid across his path."

"If only his father could be as reasonable as you are, Ms. Praz," Lady Greeblel said with an elegantly regretful sigh. "The man is already throwing around such baseless accusations. One can only imagine how deep his well of vitriol will prove to be by the time he has finished calling in all of the countless favors which will no doubt be necessary to expunge his son's actions from the public's memory. I fear his wrath may extend to encompass all those who he imagines to be accomplices in his son's fall from grace."

"So you called to warn us away from returning to your planet."

"I have done no such thing, nor would I ever," Lady Greeble said. "I called to inquire whether you and your crew would be willing to perform another service for me on a planet which coincidentally happens to be much closer to your current location than my own. I have several options you could choose from, though the most lucrative to you would require collaboration outside of your usual associates, because that particular task will require a certain familiarity with information technologies which unfortunately you do not possess. You would have final pick of who you work with, of course, but I have compiled a dossier of talented candidates to help get you started on your search."

"I'll have to discuss it with my crew before I agree to anything, of course," Raz said.

"Of course," Lady Greeble agreed.

"And if we do agree, then I might want to work with someone who isn't in your dossier," Raz said, very carefully keeping her expression neutral for the camera and resisting the urge to glance in Winn's direction.

"That would be your prerogative, but I will need to know your decision withing twelve hours," Lady Greeble said. "The matter is, once again, rather time sensitive." An alert flashed in the corner to Raz's screen, indicating that Lady Greeble had just transferred a collection of mixed media data files to the Horror Vacui.

"I'll see what I can do," Raz said.

"I look forward to hearing from you again," Lady Greeble said, and ended the call.

"So," Raz drawled as she oh so casually swiveled around in her seat to face Winn again after having a few seconds to glance at the top bullet points of what Lady Greeble hoped they could accomplish for her, "is there any chance you'd be willing to let me sweep you off your feet and into a life of flying around the galaxy and doing ridiculous things like filling stasis pods with little fish for suspiciously large sums of money? The hours are irregular and a lot of the people we meet in a professional capacity are assholes, but we get to visit all sorts of interesting places and we're almost never bored. You can even bring Ken along if you can convince him to wear clothes in public."

"I think you might be able to talk me into it," Winn said. "If," she added, flipping away the sheets to fully display her naked body, "you're willing to ask really nicely."

And that's exactly what they did.

**The End**


End file.
